Wee Ginger Dug: Why this General Election will be Scotland’s last …

IT’S week two of the General Election campaign that no-one wanted except the woman who says no to an independence referendum on the grounds that she doesn’t want it. The party whose clothes Theresa May has stolen has revealed its big election pledge. Having seen the Conservatives steal all their policies, Ukip has had no choice but to go full on frother, which wasn’t easy since they were already doing a very good impression of Old Faithful to begin with.

Party leader Paul Nuttall, best known for an inventive approach to his personal history, took time out from planning the next manned mission to Mars to launch Ukip’s manifesto. Originally one of the goals of the mission had been to search for extraterrestrial life, but Paul’s been finding it difficult to get funding as everyone else has pointed out that there’s no need because Ukip is already full of people from another planet. You only need to look at David Coburn to see that. However the party has a new contender for the position of most outlandish Ukipper in Scotland in the shape of a Clydebank council candidate who confessed to a sexual attraction to gorillas. But not gay gorillas. She’ll be having none of that indecency.

Instead the party is going to concentrate on finding something to distinguish themselves from the Tories in order to have a hope of getting someone elected so they’re going to get back to basics and demonise some migrants. Paul’s had a grudge against migrant communities ever since he was thrown out of The Beatles for pointing out to John Lennon that Yoko was a foreigner, but since the Conservatives have also gone full-on xenophobe of late, Ukip’s had no choice but to go even more extreme.

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Ukip wants to ban Sharia law, but to be fair most of their members think that Sharia Law is a Trump supporting country and western singer from Alabama. However, the centrepiece of the party’s election policy is a pledge to ban Muslim women from wearing face veils. Ukip points out that this isn’t an extreme policy at all, since it’s already been introduced in a number of European countries and they don’t want the UK to fall behind the curve and fail to introduce something that’s already widespread in Europe. This is because copying European policies is what Ukip is all about. Oh. Wait.

Jeremy Corbyn came to Scotland to launch Labour’s campaign and, in what was not so much a manifesto as a desperate plea to avoid extinction, he called on Scotland’s voters to reject the “vicious Tories”, which is something that Scotland’s voters have been doing considerably more successfully than voters in the rest of the UK, for all the good it’s done us. We really don’t need Jeremy to tell us to reject them. However, Jeremy isn’t at all keen on a Scotland that rejects the vicious Tories permanently through independence. Instead he prefers a Scotland that stays under the thumb of vicious Tories because sacrificing Scotland’s working classes on the altar of the inadequacies of the English left is how Jeremy sees Scotland’s role in this glorious Union.

Ian Murray, their sole MP in Scotland isn’t on speaking terms with Jeremy and clearly didn’t get the message about the viciousness of Tories. Ian has other electoral fish to fry, mostly to do with saving his own skin. Last week in a fit of blinkered Scottish Labour tribalism Ian told The Guardian that he supported tactical voting to oppose the SNP because apparently he hates them more than he hates the vicious Tories. After the Tories get their landslide, Ian will then blame the SNP for letting the Tories in. Then after it was pointed out to him that he’d just told Unionists in most of Scotland to vote Tory, he quickly retracted and claimed he meant that he only supported tactical voting in his own constituency. Which means that Ian is opportunistic and unprincipled as well as tribal and blinkered. This is what makes him a perfect specimen of a Scottish Labour MP, and the embodiment of the kind of politics that has reduced his party to an irrelevance in this General Election.

The Tories in Scotland have got only one policy. It’s the exact same as their sole policy in the council elections, and the same as their only policy in last year’s Holyrood elections. It’s their policy of complaining that the SNP is obsessed with an independence referendum. The Tories talk about nothing else, but it’s the SNP which is obsessed. In order to concentrate on obsessionally complaining that someone else is obsessed, the Tories would prefer to pretend that none of the policies of their political masters in Westminster has anything to do with them, like that rape clause which Tory MSP Jackson Carlaw described over the weekend as “awkward”. On Monday Ruth Davidson had another of her cheery photo-ops on a quad bike wheelchair designed to allow disabled people access to the Scottish countryside while the Conservatives remove mobility cars from disabled people preventing them from gaining access to the local supermarket.

The Tories would prefer to concentrate on defending the Union and hoovering up die-hard Unionist voters who prioritise keeping Scotland in the UK without caring too much what sort of UK they’re keeping Scotland in. There are people in Scotland who will vote for the Union even if it means voting for a party which is throwing the Union into an abyss and which will destroy their jobs, their human and civil rights, and isolate them from the rest of Europe. Many of them previously voted Labour, but now they’re turning to the Tories. The so-called Tory revival isn’t a revival at all, it’s the last stage in the collapse of Labour. It’s not a revival that has the strength to defeat the SNP, because only a minority of Scottish voters are diehard Unionists. Despite the confident crowing of Conservative candidates, this election will not put the question of independence to bed for good.

The SNP are making a pitch to that part of Labour’s support which hasn’t sold its soul to the Unionist devil. The leaders of both the SNP and Labour launched their Scottish campaigns with speeches to the Scottish Trades Union Congress conference in Aviemore. While Jeremy Corbyn represented the Islington ideologues who want to smash the system, Nicola Sturgeon spoke directly to the workers whose jobs and livelihoods are most threatened by Conservative policies and as the First Minister of Scotland she’s got more power to do something about it. It’s not hard to see which of the two has the greater appeal.

This will be the third election in a row in which Scotland votes for a party which wants a referendum on Scotland’s future, Holyrood last year, the council elections, and the General Election. What will finally be put to bed is the Tories’ vainglorious claim that no-one wants a referendum despite the predictable claims in the UK media that Ruth Davidson has won a stunning victory by coming second while Nicola Sturgeon has suffered a humiliating defeat by coming first. But whatever the Union’s media cheerleaders say, Scotland will have explicitly rejected the Tory claim that no-one wants a referendum. So there will be a referendum within the lifetime of the next Westminster Parliament, and with support for independence at 49% before it has even been called, this Westminster General Election will be the last UK General Election in Scotland.

Ipsoregulated

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